fr_defenestrato | Happy Shostakovich's Birthday!

First of all, I made the Reader's Digest, but in a rather unsatisfactory way. The good news is I received a check from the Reader's Digest yesterday for $300. Here is the bad news.

Maybe 6 or 7 weeks ago I sent in an anecdote (the first time, BTW, I'd ever done so) for consideration for inclusion in one of their many anecdoteries (Life in These United States, et al.). It read thus:

My fellow baritones and I were sitting around after rehearsal one night discussing possible definitions of "geekdom" when one opined that the members of our singing group were geeks because, collectively, we're seldom at a loss for information or answers. I disagreed, saying that geek rather connotes the tireless cultivation of specialized knowledge, and that "having command of a large body of general information does not a geek make." My friend Peter, without missing a beat, said, "Yes, but verbs at the end of your sentence putting does."

In mid-August a representative of the Reader's Digest called me to confirm my information and, especially, the wording of the last sentence of my submission. I explicitly stated that the wording was correct as submitted and added that the inverted syntax was, in fact, "the whole point of the joke."

So in the current (October 2007) edition of the Reader's Digest, in the Life in These United States column, the following appears:

We'd finished our rehearsal, and the members of my singing group were hanging out discussing what makes a geek. One guy offered, "We're all sort of geeks because we're seldom at a loss for answers." / "Having a command of a large body of information does not a geek make, "I argued. / "Maybe not," said my friend Peter, "but putting verbs at the end of a sentence does."

*Sigh.* Humans are just so very profoundly fucking stupid.

Anyway, in the spirit of geekery, I'm sure you'll all recall that Dmitri Shostakovich would have turned 101 today. I hope you will all take this occasion to check out one of his string quartets or symphonies, or maybe the 24 Preludes and Fugues, or his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk.

Now back to our regularly scheduled rant: This is not the first time I've been bastardized in print: On two occasions (one as the writer of a Letter to the Editor, one as an actual op-ed columnist) some semiliterate editor on the staff of the University of Delaware Review "clarified" my text because they did not recognize and could not be bothered to look up a vocabulary word. On the first occasion the word was "lest," something like "...lest we forget so-and-so's contributions..."; the editor changed "lest" to "at least": "...at least we forget their contributions...". Really. I shit you not.

On the second occasion, I was writing in defense of Jack Kevorkian contra my sometime nemesis (and object of my unrequited love), Greg Orlando, to whom assisted suicide was simply murder with rhetorical props. I wrote something like this: "If we cannot suffer our physicians to assist at the end of life—they who, one assumes, are the fittest for such work—then who will help the pain-wracked terminally ill?" Yes, "suffer" in the sense of "permit." 'Cause that's the kind of geek I am. Of course my editor had no knowledge of that sense, and so changed my line to "If we cannot suffer, our physicians will assist at the end of life, etc."

The next week I included in my column an apology for the botching of my semantic intent and an explanation of what the line should have been (very much in the form of the above paragraph). The paper was in paste-up, ready to go to print, when I checked my column and found that the same editor had AGAIN changed my "suffer" sentence to read as it had the previous week—such that my column would have said, in essence, "My statement last week that 'The world is flat' proceeded from an editorial mistake; I really meant to say 'The world is flat.'"

I changed it back and had the editor killed and buried at my own expense.